We’ve gushed about Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries a few times here on ye olde Mythcreants, but did you know she’s written other books as well? One such book is The Cloud Roads, the first novel of the Raksura series. While Murderbot’s worldbuilding is fairly minimal and relies heavily on established space-opera tropes, Cloud Roads is a high-fantasy story that boldly strikes out on its own, crafting a world of fresh and unique ideas! Unfortunately, most of those ideas are very bad, and a few of them are straight-up toxic.
Content Notice: Discussion of racism, sexism, and sexual violence in fiction.
The Good
But wait – it’s not all bad, I promise! Wells is a skilled writer, and she’s more than capable of creating a well-built world for us to explore. She just doesn’t do that very often in this book.
Flying Islands
Two things immediately strike you from the first page of The Cloud Roads. First: this protagonist is clearly a test run for Murderbot, complete with the dry observations and being surrounded by less-capable people who mistreat him.* Second: wow, these flying islands are cool!
Drifting through the sky are big chunks of rock and soil, most of them large enough to support their own ecosystems, and they add a lot to the story in very little time. For characters who can’t fly, the islands are pure mystery: What’s up there, and could it be dangerous? For characters who can fly, they’re a great opportunity to explore. Most of the important characters in The Cloud Roads have wings, so Wells goes for the second option, but it would have worked either way. That’s how cool the flying islands are.
The islands give our heroes the chance to explore new biomes without weeks of travel time, since the exploration comes to them instead! The local area might be temperate woodlands, but the islands can be rain forest, snowy tundra, or even desert. Plus, the islands have their own animal life, which can include anything from adorable furballs to scary monsters.
That’s all pretty cool already, but Wells also uses the islands to give her world a sense of history, as many of them bear ancient ruins from the distant past. These ruins aren’t the focus of Cloud Roads’ plot,* but they still help avoid the feeling that this world only came into existence a few minutes before the opening sentence. They also hint at a great cataclysm, which Wells could certainly do more with in later books if she chooses.
As a final bonus, the flying islands also allow the setting to have airships. Reading the story, I actually wondered if there was a way to harness whatever force keeps the islands aloft, and it turns out there is! By harvesting chunks of a special stone from within the islands, at least one group of merchants and traders is able to lift its ships skyward. This is cool because it’s a natural extension of existing setting elements, and also because I love airships. Put airships in your story if you want me to say something positive about the worldbuilding.
Monstrous Wilds
The flying islands are, if you’ll pardon the pun, a major high point for the setting, but the regular ground is cool too! Lots of stories feature monster attacks, but it’s rare to see a world that seems like it could support a large monster population. One of the first things humans* do when they populate an area is clear out the megafauna, either deliberately or as an unintended side effect. It’s difficult to have a stable system of agriculture if dire tigers keep rampaging through the fields.
In the early chapters at least, The Cloud Roads bucks that trend. We see a world made up of small, isolated communities rather than densely populated cities or centralized kingdoms. While we hear of great empires that existed in the past, they all seem to have fallen by the time the story starts. The people of this world have little contact with each other, and travel is rare. The protagonist has been to quite a few places, but unlike most, he can fly.
That means we have a lot of wilderness for hostile fauna to exist in, and it’s not just terrestrial predators. Since the important characters can fly, we also need flying creatures for them to tangle with. In later books, ocean critters also get in on the action. This all contributes to the feeling that travel is dangerous rather than acting as a simple exercise in expositing about new terrain features. Tension goes up whenever the characters need to leave town, and it also helps the book stand out from other fantasy entries where the monsters appear to spring fully formed from the ether.
Creative Flyers
Initially, protagonist Moon is the only character who can fly, but that’s only because he hasn’t met others of his kind yet. That doesn’t last long, though: we soon find out that Moon’s species is called the Raksura, and they’re a bit like humanoid dragons. They have colorful scales, powerful wings, deadly claws, and dangerous teeth. Just about the only thing they’re missing is a breath weapon. At least some of them also keep growing throughout their lifespan, and since they live a long time, they can get very large indeed. This evokes images of ever-growing crocodiles, even though real-life crocodiles don’t do that.
Visually, the Raksura have a wide variety of scale colors, and Wells’s description makes them sound truly beautiful. They also have unique body language, flaring their spines and hissing to show displeasure. I’m sure they also have body language to demonstrate positive emotions, but since these books are full of drama, we don’t see that as often.
Beyond their appearance, Wells does a lot of work showing us how the Raksura’s physical characteristics affect their behavior. They have little use for weapons or cutting tools, since their claws will serve for all but the most difficult tasks and their scales serve as excellent armor. They have a lot of leisure time, as they don’t need many of the industries that sustain a human population. Nor do they need much agriculture, as their flight makes it very easy for them to hunt and catch terrestrial prey. That said, they also have very complex social rules when it comes to who’s in charge, which Wells takes full advantage of to create the drama I mentioned earlier.
As most of the story’s important characters are Raksura, it’s good that they’re such an interesting species. It adds novelty early in the story and lets readers build attachment that quickly becomes critical once we encounter what else this story’s worldbuilding has in store for us.
The Bad
Unfortunately, that’s about it for the positives, and we’re just getting started. The Cloud Roads isn’t even that long by epic fantasy standards,* but it never stops introducing new world elements, so let’s get to it.
Underpowered Groundlings
The Raksura are very well fleshed out with lots of novelty and interesting traits, but they aren’t the only species* in this novel. Everyone else is referred to as “groundlings” because they can’t fly, and there sure are a lot of them. By the end of The Cloud Roads, we’ve met at least four different groundling species, and we’ve heard about many more.
Technically, none of these are humans, which don’t seem to exist at all in this world. I say “technically” because, other than a few cosmetic details, they’re all basically humans: two arms, two legs, a pair of grasping hands, etc. While the Raksura are flitting around on their great wings and enjoying the benefits of sharp claws, every groundling we meet has exactly the same abilities a human has. Raksura are also stronger and faster than groundlings, just to rub it in.
This has a few problems, the most notable of which is that the groundlings all blur together. I can describe most of the Raksura protagonists from memory, but I couldn’t tell you what any of the groundlings they meet look like. Heck, I can’t even be sure how many different types are in the story. I think it was four, but they’re all essentially the same compared to the Raksura.
The worldbuilding also feels terribly lopsided. The Raksura have all these abilities that take them beyond what humans are capable of, and groundlings get nothing. Near the end, we finally meet another species that can also fly, but they don’t have anything to match the Raksura’s many other abilities. It makes you feel bad for the groundlings and also question why the world is even like this. Why does one sapient species get all the toys, while the others get nothing? A made-up world can technically have whatever rules the author desires, but that doesn’t make it feel right. In the story’s many confrontations between Raksura and groundlings, our heroes come across as overpowered bullies. I ended up cheering for the groundlings even though they’re supposed to be wrong!
Pointless Shapeshifters
There’s an important aspect of the Raksura that I haven’t covered yet: they’re also shapeshifters! That might sound like yet another ability on top of all the others they already have, but it could also be a fun way of adding more novelty. So, what do they shapeshift into? Less powerful versions of themselves.
To be more specific, the Raksura all have what they call a “groundling form.” It’s not super clear what this form looks like, but it’s still humanoid. When in this form, the Raksura lose their wings, claws, teeth, armored scales, and heightened physical abilities like strength and speed. They become, in effect, baseline humans just like all the other groundlings.
This is easily the most boring type of shapeshifting I have ever seen in a published novel, and also the most pointless. When you give someone shapeshifting powers, the expectation is that they have reasons to be in both forms. Werewolves, for example, might use their wolf form for combat, tracking, or speed, while they use their human forms when they need to drive a car or buy groceries. Even werewolves that shift into humanoid-wolf hybrids usually don’t want to stay in wolf form all the time, as that’s when they have to deal with bestial bloodlust.
By contrast, there’s almost nothing that the Raksura can do in their groundling form but not in their flying form. The only utility their groundling form has is letting them blend in with other groundlings, something almost no Raksura ever has to do. At this point, you have to ask why the Raksura don’t stay in their flying form all the time. The only explanation we’re given is that their groundling form doesn’t need to eat as often, but the Raksura are so good at hunting that this never matters.
Out-of-Control Magic
We’ve already covered the Raksura’s many physical abilities, which make them seem really overpowered compared to the other species in Wells’s world. Unfortunately, that is nothing compared to the seemingly endless list of magical powers that Raksuran wizards have. They’re called “mentors,” and here’s the best list I could make of their various powers:
- Crafting magic lamps and magic heaters
- Raising the potency of poisons and medicine
- Healing others
- Detecting mind control
- Predicting the future
You might be wondering why they’re called mentors when none of their powers relate to teaching. I think it’s because future predictions impart knowledge, but since that’s only one of many abilities, the connection is thin. This is already a wild list of powers in what’s otherwise a very low-magic world, and then we meet some evil mentors who take it even further. In addition to the powers above, they have remote viewing and can force Raksura into their weaker form. Also, if they use their remote viewing on you for too long, you get bad luck.
This list of powers feels like it was generated by pulling random numbers out of a hat. If mentors can do all that, can they also control birds? Maybe they turn lead into gold or start fires with their minds. It’s all equally likely, given the complete lack of theming, and made worse by the piecemeal way Wells introduces mentor powers, stringing them out until it feels like new powers could just keep being added forever. In a particularly bad scene, there’s a big conflict over the suspicion that the bad guys may have used mind control on one of the heroes, and this conflict is solved by a mentor suddenly revealing that they can actually detect mind control. Great.
Future predictions, remote vision, and bad luck are also just bad powers to give anyone in your story, hero or villain. If the predictions actually worked, there would never be any tension, as the characters could just use magic to see what the best path is. To deal with this, Wells has predictions mysteriously fail until she needs the characters to do something they otherwise wouldn’t, and then the predictions work again. The remote vision has a similar problem, as the story has to keep justifying why the bad guys can see just enough to enact their convoluted plan but not enough to know a much simpler plan would work. The bad luck is just confusing, as it’s blamed for a bunch of bad things happening and then mysteriously goes away when it’s time for the heroes to start winning.
Flying Orcs
Believe it or not, there’s actually one species in this setting with powers to match the Raksura. These are the Fell, and they’re our big villains. They can do almost everything the Raksura can do, which is good. It would be a pretty short story otherwise.* Unfortunately, the Fell are an inherently evil species, a trope I really thought high fantasy was growing out of.
The Fell aren’t just a group that does bad things. The book is very clear that being evil is in their nature. They’re compared to parasites: feeding off of others and never creating anything for themselves. Except in this case, “feeding” means that they literally eat their enemies. They also constantly stink, which is about the most visceral way to signal that they’re bad.
We’ve explained the problem with this trope before, but the short version is that when stories cast an entire species or race as evil, it reinforces real-life ideas about how certain people are inherently bad. It’s also just hard to believe. The Fell are so cartoonishly destructive that it’s difficult to see how they could have evolved that way, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we learn in later books that an evil god made them that way just because.
On the bright side, the Fell aren’t obviously coded as people of color the way orcs often are, so in that way, they aren’t quite as bad as what Tolkien got up to.* But on the less bright side, their big evil plan is that they want to “breed” with the Raksura to produce powerful offspring.
Oh boy. So now we have an evil species whose main goal is to rape the good guys. I know I said the Fell aren’t obviously POC coded, but that sounds an awful lot like what white supremacists say about anyone with darker skin than them. It also casts the heroes as not just trying to stop rape, but also being disgusted at the idea of any mixing between Fell and Raksura. Gotta keep the bloodlines pure, I guess!
Magical Caste Systems
In the midst of harshing on the Fell, we shouldn’t forget that the Raksura are also loaded with toxic tropes. One of those is their magically enforced caste system. You see, until now I’ve only been describing one type of Raksura called Aeriat.* There’s a second type called Arbora, and they form the Raksura’s labor class. The Aeriat are always the leaders, while the Arbora do the work.
That might sound like an unjust system ripe for overthrow, but instead the book assures us it’s a good system that the Arbora are very happy with. The Arbora don’t have wings, you see, so they’re just less capable than the Aeriat and need their protection. The narration even tries to tell us that it’s the Arbora who are really in charge since the Aeriat don’t want to upset them.
That’s a really weird claim to make, and the book never shows us any evidence that it’s true. The only Arbora ever involved in decision-making are mentors, whom apparently only Arbora can be. I’m guessing Wells threw that in as a consolation prize for being so much less capable than the Aeriat, but it doesn’t help. The mentors seem to have as much in common with other Arbora as Gandalf does with regular humans.*
Even if we saw real evidence that the Arbora’s opinion mattered to the Aeriat at all, this would still be a toxic trope because that’s not how power and privilege actually work. The only way for less-privileged groups to ensure equitable treatment is for them to have a say in the decision-making process, be it through labor organizing, voting rights, or legal representation. Relying on the kind whims of those in power is a losing game every time.
Don’t worry, the Aeriat also suffer from caste system problems, though not to the same degree. Among these super-candied flyers, queens and consorts are of the highest rank, with warriors below them. The higher-ranked Aeriat are bigger and more powerful, with queens even having mind-control powers that only work on other Raksura. That sounds pretty horrific, but it’s portrayed as totally fine and the way things should be. In fact, one of the antagonistic Raksura is specifically painted as being bad for acting like a consort when he’s really just a warrior. What a scamp – he should know his place as determined by the genetic lottery of birth!
Magical Gender Essentialism
One positive aspect of The Cloud Roads is that the Raksura are fairly open to queer and polyamorous relationships. We even learn that Moon is bisexual, and no one acts like that’s weird. Excellent, more spec fic like this, please.
Unfortunately, despite those good points, the Raksura still manage to have rigid gender roles in one area: queens and consorts. Queens are in charge, and they’re always female. Consorts are always male, and it’s their job to give the queens babies. To be clear, “queen” and “consort” aren’t job titles; they’re special types of Raksura who also get the leadership roles by default.
Tying these roles to gender is really irritating, as it makes adding trans or nonbinary characters difficult. Theoretically, we could imagine a Raksuran group that ties those roles specifically to reproductive ability rather than gender, but in practice that gets very messy. As long as the one having babies is called a “queen,” the gender binary will always feel baked in.
We also have a kind of straw matriarchy here, as consorts are treated like property of their attached queen. It’s fine if the consort has other relationships on the side, but they’d better be ready to have kids when the queen wants to or there’ll be heck to pay. The queens even fight over who gets which consort, with the consorts having no say in the matter. This is especially weird considering that the protagonist himself is a consort, and when two queens fight over him, he doesn’t seem particularly worried. Fortunately, the queen he likes is victorious, or things would have been awkward.
You might recognize this as a reversal of the common trope where two or more men fight over a woman. Flipping the genders doesn’t make the idea any better, and hardwiring it into the world’s speculative aspects removes any chance to use it for social commentary. All we’re left with is a fantasy species that uses violence to decide who has sex with whom, and they’re the good guys!
Isolated Interconnectivity
Thankfully, we can now move away from the bigotry issues and engage in my favorite pastime: complaining about economic and military implications! Earlier, I praised The Cloud Roads for the way it portrays a world of isolated communities, but it’s not long before we learn that’s not actually true. While the story starts in an isolated community, the world is full of merchant caravans, trade fleets, and densely populated cities. We encounter not one but two city-states that make their money from trade. The world is very interconnected, it seems.
This raises a whole host of problems. It’s difficult to imagine such flourishing trade networks existing in a world where monsters are ready to eat you the moment you step outside. Either someone would take steps to cull the monster population, or trade would be too risky. A similar problem emerges in the plot. At the start of the story, Moon doesn’t know anything about his people, not even that they’re called Raksura. But later, we discover that the Raksura are fairly common, and that plenty of groundlings know about them. In years of searching, how did Moon never meet anyone who had heard of his people?
That’s all small potatoes compared to the Fell, though. In some chapters, they act like roving bandits, appearing to raid and then vanishing again. But in others, they’re more like a conquering army, literally consuming all in their path. Given that, it’s very weird that none of the people we meet, groundlings or Raksura, seem interested in fighting them. There’s no attempt to build a united front or to secure defensive alliances. Heck, no one in the story is even preparing for war, despite the Fell being right next door.
Of course, a common enemy doesn’t guarantee that disparate groups will band together, but it’s extremely weird that no one is even trying. It feels like no one in this setting has object permanence when it comes to the Fell. The Fell are scary and dangerous when they appear, but the moment they’re out of sight, everyone just goes back to what they were doing.
Confusing Terminology
The world of Cloud Roads is extremely complex, meaning it’s more important than ever to have an intuitive set of terminology. Unfortunately, we get the exact opposite. The terminology in this book is so bad, I sometimes wonder if it’s confusing on purpose.
For example, non-Raksura are called “groundlings,” which seems to make sense since they can’t fly. But Arbora can’t fly either, and they make up more than half of the Raksura’s numbers. Are they also groundlings? What really separates the Raksura from everyone else is their shapeshifting, but the terminology doesn’t reflect that.
That’s just the tip of the confusion iceberg. We’re told that most Aeriat are “warriors” and their job is to protect the colony, but there’s also a group of Arbora called “soldiers” who do… something, I assume. The characters constantly talk about certain powers that are able to “keep them from shifting,” when what they really mean is force them into their weaker form.
But hey, it’s not just the Raksura who have bewildering names for things; the Fell do it too! There are multiple types of Fell, but the two we care about are the major kethel and the minor dakti. The “major” and “minor” adjectives are a bit too clinical for my tastes, more like something you’d find in a monster manual than in a living world, but that’s a small gripe. More important is that such a naming convention leads you to expect that there are also minor kethel and major dakti.
There are not. At least, not anywhere I could find. What I could find were a lot of instances where kethel and dakti were referred to without any adjective. Does that mean those ones are different types of Fell, or are they the same kinds with their names shortened? Why do they even have the adjective if there’s only one kind of each? There’s more I could show you, but I think the point is clear by now: this book takes an already confusing situation and makes it worse with truly bizarre terminology.
What We Can Learn
The Cloud Roads doesn’t have the worst worldbuilding mistakes of all the novels I’ve critiqued,* but it does have the most, even though it’s far from the longest. That’s just what happens when so much of the book is devoted to introducing new setting elements. I suppose that’s a lesson in itself: if you build more world than you can handle, things won’t go well.
Unorthodox Terrain Is Novel
As cathartic as it was to finally vent my spleen about The Cloud Roads and its many problems, I still really enjoyed the many unusual locations featured in this book and the rest of the series. Flying islands are the stand-out example, but we also see things like an entire city built on a slowly turning stone and a colony of sapient bees.
I’m not saying every fantasy novel has to get weird with its locations, but doing so will help you stand out. Veteran fantasy readers have seen a lot of towering forests and snowy mountains. It will help even more if you explore the implications of unusual terrain. The Cloud Roads does this once, when Wells uses flying islands to explain how airships work, but the rest of the setting exists mostly as window dressing.
Don’t Overcomplicate
So many of Cloud Roads’ problems stem from Wells adding new setting elements when she really should have made do with what she already had. Sometimes, this is a case of recursive worldbuilding. There’s no real reason for the Arbora to exist, except that Wells liked the idea of two separate species combining to form the Raksura, something that gets exposited near the end.
We also have several cases of extraneous worldbuilding used to prop up weak plots. The Raksuran shapeshifting feels exceptionally pointless, but it’s needed at the beginning so that there can be a plot of Moon hiding who he is among groundlings. Likewise, the incredibly vague future-sight and scrying powers exist so that there’s an excuse for the villains to know where Moon will be years in advance.
If you ever find yourself adding something big and flashy to the setting because you need it to make the plot work, chances are the plot itself needs revision. What this book needed was a conflict that would draw Moon and the villains together, not something that depended on the bad guys having knowledge of the future.
Likewise, worldbuilding elements should support each other. If you find yourself adding new stuff that dilutes your theme, chances are it should be axed. The Raksura work well as a dragon-like species whose most prominent trait is flight. Adding a second type of Raksura who don’t even have wings increases complexity without making the world any deeper.
Don’t Magically Enforce Bigotry
There is a place in speculative fiction for stories about discriminatory social rules. It’s not nearly as large a place as some authors think, but if you’re going to comment on the evils of bigotry, you often need some bigotry in the story. That said, there’s almost never a reason to bake that bigotry into the rules of your world.
This may be a shocking statement, but in real life, caste systems and rigid gender roles are bad. Even so, lots of people love them, because some people just can’t let go of bad ideas. When such discrimination is magically enforced, it validates the people who would love to see something similar in the real world. For the rest of us, it’s just unpleasant.
I do not believe this was the author’s intent. Everything I know about Martha Wells suggests she’s fairly progressive. My best guess is that she was modeling the Raksura off eusocial insects like ants and bees. But, as we’re so fond of saying, the author’s intent is far less important than what they actually wrote. It’s also a bad parallel, since insect queens don’t actually issue commands to the rest of the colony; they’re just instinct-driven egg factories.
Decide What Kind of World You Want
The final lesson we can draw from The Cloud Roads is that it’s important to know what you want from your world. Wells seems to have a lot of contradictory ideas about her setting. Is the land wild and sparsely populated or settled and urban? Are the Fell roving marauders or a conquering army? Are the Raksura rare and hidden, or do they fly around all over the place?
Granted, avoiding these contradictions is easier said than done. There are so many possibilities when you first sit down to build your world; it’s really difficult to pick only the ones that work together. You might want a realistic and gritty industrial setting, with technology drawn directly from real life, but also giant mechs are very cool. What harm could it do to give the protagonist a steampunk battlesuit?
A lot, as it turns out. If readers are constantly wondering why the world is the way it is, they won’t have a lot of attention left for the actual story. You’ll also lose most of the benefits you were after in the first place. A realistic, low-magic, industrial setting is great for making readers empathize with the plight of mistreated workers. But if you add an implausibly high-tech battlesuit, the realism disappears and the story doesn’t hit as hard.
The good news is that Martha Wells herself seems to have learned a few lessons from the Raksura books, as few of the problems from The Cloud Roads appear in the later Murderbot Diaries. She still has a few terminology issues, like “bot” sometimes being a catchall term for robots and sometimes indicating a specific type of bot, but otherwise her worldbuilding is much better. Here’s hoping it stays that way, ’cause if I have to read about Murderbot shapeshifting into a less-cool robot, I’m gonna flip a table.
P.S. Our bills are paid by our wonderful patrons. Could you chip in?
Oren, may I interest you in flying houses instead of airships?
If I may, you might want to take a look at “The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels” by India Holton (the first book in the ‘Dangerous Damsels’ series). In this version of the Victorian era, a woman stranded after her husband crashed their pirate ship found a Latin poem which can be used to levitate and steer everything, no matter the size. After her husband had an ‘accident,’ she flew a small hut back to England, gave her home a cannon upgrade, shared the poem with other ladies from her tea round, and became a pirate. Since then, there have been women and men who fly their homes across the sky to plunder – but all women are part of the Wisteria Society, which has three rule: do not endanger civilians, do not pour the milk before the tea, and do not steal another lady’s house. On the other hand, setting an assassin on a fellow member is allowed and rather common – a rite of passage of sorts. The female lead is only a junior member and not allowed her own house, but she can fly one (and just had her first assassin set on her).
The story plays wonderfully with a lot of pulp and adventure tropes and is a lot of fun to read, too. With the flying houses (at some point, even Buckingham Palace takes off) and the lady pirates, there’s quite a bit of novelty and there’s nice twists and turns throughout the story, too. I especially like the one in the end about the maidenly aunt who raised the female lead (as the orphaned lead is a trope, too).
Oooooh, sounds very airshippy to me!
Flying houses are the airship equivalents of trailers and recreational vehicles.
Not the way those ladies fly them … there’s an aerial battle between an array of smaller houses and an abbey in the book.
It’s also always a bit aesthetically disappointing to me when a big exciting new species is basically humans with one or two things extra. Except for elongated claw-fingers and birdlike talons for feet (which are cool), it looks like the Raksura are just humans with tentacle-hair(?) and wings. Whenever that kind of thing happens, I always just find myself wishing they did more with, say, their facial features or body composition. Their scales don’t even seem particularly scaley; that just looks like skin – it doesn’t affect the way their bodies are shaped at all! It might as well be a bodysuit with a scale pattern. I think one of the schticks of the series seems to be that it doesn’t have human characters, just humanoids – but come on, this is way too human and barely any -oid! The shapeshifting just makes that worse. (Putting aside that all the cover art of them also makes them look uniformly buff for the male-appearing characters and uniformly skinny and hot for the female-appearing ones.) Maybe it’s just the art, but that feels like a missed opportunity!
As a side note, I legitimately don’t know how this works, but since they’re dragon-themed… do they lay eggs? Or do they get pregnant? Do they nurse their young? Because I don’t know why, if they’re supposed to be reptilian, they have mammalian breasts, either. But I haven’t read the books, so that could be explained there.
So I’ll admit I actually like the Raksura description. It’s much better than the “groundlings” which are vaguely human with one or two fantasy features. However, if you wanna see some bad fantasy art, check out the audio book cover for the final Raksura book and see how much worse it is than previous covers.
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51fJjHalanL._SL500_.jpg
I didn’t have time to mention this in the post, but the Raksura birth is also a bit weird. They give live birth too litters of 4-6 babies at a time, but it’s described as being very easy and relatively painless because the babies are so small. The babies then grow super fast, for some reason.
I’m not against making childbirth easy in a fantasy setting, it just seems mean to give the Raksura a special easy birth power while all the groundlings need to do it the normal, very difficult way.
Also Raksura can consciously decide if they get pregnant or not. Which again, is a cool thing for a fantasy setting, but it feels weird that only Raksura can do that. I don’t know if they do any nursing, that’s never specified IIRC, but I don’t think so. We see that the Arbora raise the kids communally (wouldn’t want the golden Ariat to do any work), which probably wouldn’t work if there was lactation involved.
So I guess the only reason they have dragon-boobs is… for the heck of it? Maybe the reasoning is that how else would we know they were ~female~? (Ugh!)
Yeah, I definitely agree with making childbirth easy, and yeah it feels like something that would be weird if cherry-picked like that, in terms of who gets it.
I will admit that my gripe with their appearance is mostly a personal aesthetic thing, because if they’re dragon-like I want more emphasis on the dragon part, dammit! Although I do think the seemingly universal stereotypically “hot” characteristics on all the covers is a bigger problem than my personal tastes. So I will take you to task on that!
Also wooooow yeah that cover is… nooooo. That is literally just a person in a shirt photoshopped with wings and color-shifted green. Not even with tentacle hair! And then just a generic earth-mountains-background! WAT.
The publisher for that book is different, including a new narrator, and fans were not happy. All the reviews are like “5 stars for the story, 1 star for the narration. The characters don’t sound like that!”
While the Raskura are definitely more human than dragon, I’m not sure looking at the art is a good way to judge how they are presented. While the books eventually specify babies are breast-fed, it’s not actually clear whether the Raskura have breasts in their scaled dragonish form. And Wells has clearly put a lot of thought into what makes them unique, even if she collectively gives them lots of candy. They use their spines along their backside for body language and make frequent use their strong sense of smell.
More like “The Cloud Roast”, eh? :P
If I had a penny every time an author goes “wouldn’t it be wild if there was a sapient species based on eusocial insect colonies?”, but it actually just turns out nonsensical or creepy for no good reason… I wouldn’t have that many pennies, but people keep getting tempted to go that road, and I’m yet to see anything good come out of it.
Do the Fell also partake in the favourite grimdark trope of “evil species only reproduces by raping other species”? Or do they have evil queens that want to steal all the consorts of the lawful queens, Just to underline the pointless creepiness of this system?
Raksura more like… BADSURA (got’em).
Fortunately, the Fell are not Rapists By Default. They have “progenitors” who are basically their version of queens, and “rulers” instead of consorts. But so much of the plot revolves around their new plan of breeding new super powers by “joining with” (raping) the Raksura that it falls under worldbuilding in my book.
I guess you could also add “different names for basically the same concepts in different factions” to the terminology mess.
Sounds like that one meme with the two kingdoms and the “our noble ____” versus “their heathen ____”.
I think it’s an attempt to make a society that’s different, while having real-world examples to draw from. Where it breaks down is that insect societies are the way they are because their members have almost no individual intelligence, and being sapient is fundamentally incompatible with a society like that.
For bees or ants, it makes sense to a degree – they’re all a big family, since they’ve all been born by the queen. And yes, the fact that they are not individuals or sapient makes a big difference. There’s one type of mammals (mole rats) who do something similar, but the groups are much smaller and they, too, aren’t sapient.
A bit late, but I believe that some people have discussed how the pop culture understanding of eusociality not only gets things wrong, but obscures the real complexity of eusocial creatures (they aren’t a “hive mind,” workers can get into conflicts with each other, “queens” don’t make decisions). I thought someone called bogleech had posted about this, but I can’t find that post again, so maybe it was someone else?
But yeah, I’ve been thinking about the possibilities of fantasy/sci-fi eusocial civilizations that take these considerations into account. And well, if it is a civilization, maybe even make the “queen” (given the considerations mentioned earlier, organism that bears young from its own body) completely nonsentient and the sterile “workers” the ones that actually run things to emphasize that reproduction does not equal decision-making in eusocial species. Basically, the fundamental idea is that the members of the civilization don’t themselves reproduce (usually, at least), but something else produces them.
I’d also like to note that there is a line between seeming like you’re excusing bad behavior in humans by making nonhumans that do it, and portraying genuinely alien behavior because nonhumans, well, aren’t human. Here’s a link with a nice explanation: https://springhole.net/writing/writing-non-humans.htm#justification While I haven’t read the actual books, the description here does make it seem the behavior shown is creepy in a bad way (even if that wasn’t the author’s intention). But I think there’s still a place for depicting aliens with “behaviors and norms that wouldn’t be acceptable within human society” (as the author of the earlier link puts it.
I was gonna say something, but you put it very well. One of the weird things with fictional hive minds is that they tent to work like an idealized vision of monarchy rather than the complicate system of behaviors that both things are.
I wouldn’t go so far in saying that Queens in a sapient hive system would have to be unintelligent in order to not be dictators, in either the malevolent or benevolent sense.
But the point still stands, taking a more honest look at the animal we claim inspiration from would bring about very different works from the ones currently in possession of the trope.
I think for anything humanoid and sentient, it could be a problematic trope to have a non-sentient ‘queen’ only reduced to reproduction, because there are cultures which see women as ‘reproduction machines,’ too, and want to reduce them to that role. Yet, there are insects where this is actually a fact (although in those, the queen is also the one who founds the hive and does the initial work until she has workers to do it for her).
That aside, any kind of hivemind is alien to humans, because we are very clearly individuals. The Borg as a humanoid hivemind work because they don’t reproduce biologically (the Borg queen doesn’t spend all her life giving birth to new Borg – assimilation doesn’t work like that). By the very nature of a hivemind unlike the Borg one (taking over individuals and adding them to the mind), there would have to be a very different biology.
However, a queen does neither have to be a non-sentient ‘breeding machine’ nor does she have to be a dictator. She can as well be a central node of the hivemind, connecting everyone, but without the want to control it (wanting control is a very human trait). There could be a small group of genetically identical ‘queens’ splitting the reproduction and functioning as a central organisation of the hive (like a computer cluster, for instance).
The importance of drones (to use bees as an example) could be boosted, too. Perhaps the drones are the ones raising the offspring, so that the workers are free to work on other aspects of the hive (they’d have a biological interest in raising their own offspring). Perhaps the drones function as the ones who connect the hivemind to the outside world (as a hive would not risk letting strangers close to the queen).
Perhaps specialisation is baked into the very genes and the queen produces a host of different workers and soldiers by her decisions, balancing out the needs of the hive. There are many interesting aspects, but they’ll always be alien to us.
(Also replying to Cay Reet as we ran out of reply options)
So first, yeah, I suppose it could be seen as problematic if the reproducer isn’t intelligent for the reasons you gave. As K.J pointed out, that doesn’t have to be the case – I was just using it as an extreme example. They could be intelligent but not the one in absolute control. While I don’t normally do the “I’m X, so…” card, I will also note that I’m a woman who really does not want to have kids, so I think I’m sensitive to the idea of females as just breeding factories. (Woman can have misogynist views, unfortunately, but I *think* it’s still less common than men having them).
But anyway, I would go for human concepts of gender identity and gender roles not necessarily applying to nonhuman species, especially ones with very different biology. And as I said earlier, one probably should avoid the “queen” term entirely here. Perhaps a point could be made about biological sex (but even that’s very different in at least the eusocial insects than in humans: see haplodiploidy). And of course as long as we have humans with gender biases as the consumers of media, we probably can’t entirely eliminate the connotations in their minds, just try to reduce them at most, I guess. I was going to post about how the general concept of “beings that are produced by something fundamentally different” is actually very wide by giving fantasy and science-fiction hypothetical examples, but as it’s less relevant and this is getting very long, I won’t for now.
About Cay Reet’s hive-mind points, while interesting, as I also said earlier, I was specifically going for *not* a hive-mind/group-consciousness. The individual members of the species (or at least most of them) could be individually intelligent. I’ll note that with the massive caveat that things like “intelligence” and “sapience” are very slippery and hard-to-define concepts, to say the least, individual ants and bees have actually shown pretty impressive mental capacities (I haven’t been providing any links in this post as there would be a lot, but information can be found online), and some even regard them as among the most intelligent of insects and suggest that their capacities might be due to social living. They do show collective intelligence, but many groups of social animals, including humans, display similar phenomena, which don’t necessarily imply the group is conscious or that the individuals are not.
You could argue that they still aren’t “sapient,” but I’d expect you to say the same about any non-human animal with any social structure, so it’s hard to make generalizations about what is and isn’t possible from n=1, as people have said. One thing I’ve heard specifically elsewhere is that eusocial species can’t develop Machiavellian interactions (not sure about the right term), which have been argued to be the reason for human intelligence (Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis). But there seem to be a couple of points: The Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis is still controversial and not 100% proven for humans, maybe other species could develop intelligence in other ways, it might not apply for a species that didn’t come from evolution (in a lot of fantasy, the genre of the series the original article was critiquing, and even in sci-fi when technologies such as genetic engineering or AI come into play), and workers do compete in some eusocial species, so perhaps they could develop Machiavellian intelligence that way?
Although now I feel perhaps you were getting more at the idea that eusocial workers are genetically preprogrammed to help their colony, and individual sapience is incompatible with genetic programming. Besides the question of just how much real-life eusocial species are genetically programmed (ants and bees do show learning abilities; I don’t know much about naked mole rats), and just how much is incompatible with individual sapience (humans are subject to some genetic influences, and I’m pretty sure the desire to support one’s group is universal), I’m… not sure why hypothetical eusocial sapients couldn’t support their colony in flexible ways like humans do for their own homes. The last thing right now (which I had planned to mention in my first post, but forgot), is about the size of eusocial groups. It does seem that individually larger eusocial creatures form smaller groups. This *may* hinder some forms of development, maybe (bigger population size correlates with things such as technological innovation), but with the considerations above, it might not hinder the development of individual intelligence. And even in real life, there is at least one, admittedly limited, example of inter-colony cooperation that I know about: ant supercolonies. It does seem to be genetically based, but kin selection affects even humans to some degree, and perhaps other factors could play a role in hypothetical intercolony cooperation like they did in human evolution to an apparently unique degree.
Okay, you’re not the one disagreeing but as the relatively new proud owner of a eusocial sapient (fan)species I really have to say this.
Personally I think that the idea that eusociality precludes sapience is, at the very least in fantasy, more so a statement to a lack of imagination or the person in question not looking up eusociality (hint: it’s not a hivemind per-se).
Modern humans could be considered eusocial depending on how you look at it and even if we’re going with a “genetically different castes” system, there’s nothing to say that those cannot fit into a society that is far more complex than just “X caste powerful, Y caste subordinate/disposable/unimportant”.
After all, a society of sapient beings generally leads to more social roles than just, for example, “worker”, “warrior” and “queen/baby maker”, even at very local and/or unspecialized levels.
You may have scholars, religious figures, scouts, tool and cloth makers, farmers, builders, caretakers or teachers… or at least people that may be more skilled at any of these than the average joe.
Unless you have 100 different castes it’s likely that a lot of these may either typically fall to one caste without necessarily being restricted to them or be open to anyone (unless there’s also a non-biological caste system, but that’s not exactly a necessity) and there’s a high likelyhood that some of these may be more or less valued than other roles making caste far from the only class determinant.
(A personal favourite brainchild is what’s effectively a worker-caste scout (a decent social position in this city/society specifically) who gets fed up with the local government being too cautious for their own good (in xeir view) and decides to take the whole “stopping the (local-ish) apocalypse” thing into xir own hands.)
There’s MAYBE some issue with biological/gender(/sex?) essentialism, but then, there’s nothing saying that these castes have to be set in stone with no inter(sex?caste?) people and isn’t this the case with humans also?
Should we ban bimodally sexed species and gender differences?
If anything various castes are an option to explore different conceptions of gender, including dysphoria (and I’m saying this as an Enby), disability, individualism, how much society as a whole may demand from its members and many other things.
The one major factor in my mind is that they’d likely feel much more obligated to bettering society (though humans feel some of this as well), but as we know from the real world, what that means may depend a lot on the person’s worldview.
One thing I do want to explore personally is how different social systems, including leadership models, genders, industry, resource creation and sharing, social norms, individual freedoms and expectations develop in the face of that biology.
Just…even just the concept of (breeding, not ruling) queens?
Trans warrior? Their gender is actually a warrior and don’t want to produce children?
The whole spectrum of really fucked and creepy to wholesome of what being a queen may mean to a specific society/person?
Also, neopronouns and nonhuman genders (and trans people with some overlap between those two; let’s not restrict the gender fun to nonhumans). This kind of thing has so much potential even without getting into other potential aspects for nonhumans like “species that finds many human concepts like “two genders/sexes” or “vision” to be utterly alien and the ensuing culture shock”.
I remember reading this book and dropping it somewhere in the first half of the story. I remember getting progressively uncomfortable about the world building, and I hating the main character. He was all like, Oh woe is me, my backstory is full of hardship! I’m so sad and tormented! While having all the good overpowered stuff and being such a special boy he immediately landed into the leadership position when he got to his people. I guess it’s fair that the life of hardship will leave the character with a broody personality, but he was so overcandied, the story because quite boring.
I was very surprised that the author of the book i disliked so much wrote the Murderbot Diaries which I liked a lot.
A lot of Cloud Roads reads like a test run for Murderbot. Wells would then go on to refine a lot of her ideas, and so they work much better with our favorite secunit. Murderbot has a similar “I’m so put upon but also superpowered” with Moon, except Murderbot’s situation is much better explained.
Wells also seems to do better with the novella format than a full novel. The Murderbot plots are much tighter and better paced than anything in the Raksura.
To be fair, Wells is FAR from the first to do the “Woe is me, I’m so angst-ridden I don’t notice that ship made of candy I’m sitting on is sailing me down an easy current directly toward the castle labeled “best ending” bit, especially in fantasy.
So is there a reason the Fell think breeding with the Raksuran will create superior offspring other than to make them more evil/threatening? Because if I understand correctly, these are explicitly different species, and we have the author’s confirmation on that. So all things being equal, cross-breeding won’t result in children. Ever. Or, if we assume the different species are closely related enough to produce offspring, then we’re talking about something like a mule or liger or sturddlefish, none of which are particularly better than their parent species. Also, they often have health problems and tend to be sterile.
Martha Wells makes a big deal about how Fell and Raskura are related and have a fairly recent common ancestor, we know they can interbreed, and the books suggest the children can have children at least some of the time. (In real world scientific species classifications, some species can indeed interbreed fine, it’s complicated)
As for the explanation for why the Fell want to do this, it’s really contrived and retconned in later books (but no less contrived). In the first book it’s something about how the Fell are fighting each other too much, dying off and I guess need fresh blood, and in later books there’s a monster that sent them messages telling them to do it because it needed an individual resembling their common ancestor to open its dungeon.
So the monster needed like, a single individual with mixed parentage?
There had to be a better way to get that than an eugenics war.
But speaking of that; weird prescience powers, rigid social hierarchies and shadowy agents trying to breed a certain individual by mixing bloodlines… Maybe this book is secretly set in the Dune universe? :P
Lol, Moon was the Kwisatz Haderach the whole time!
I feel like there are so many better sexual paradigms to follow, especially since birds are so varied and would be great to compare. For example, I can imagine humanoid albatrosses forming a democratic society. They form bonds, but none are inherently superior and homosexual behavior is common, and labor is not separated by gender.
Or perhaps have more complicated gender roles as part of the species being emulated? Ruffs have essentially 4 genders, but are mostly cooperative. Homosexual behavior is common, and due to the blended nature of some of their roles, a trans protagonist would make sense. A “feeder” is much smaller but a sentient one could absolutely defend the territory being clever.
I think more complicated gender roles in spec fic would be interesting, it is just so rarely done.
yeah, that’s always seemed very pretty. Like, I’m not sure how to use it in narrative but that kinda extra layer to the social dynamics sounds really nices to play with.
When you look at nature you see a myriad of possible styles for procreation and raising offspring, many of which would be horrific in humans but which don’t necessarily preclude advanced societies. For example, some species of dinosaur appear to have traveled in herds based on age cohort–all the sauropods hatched this year are in one herd, that year in another. Or, look at parasitic wasps, which require laying eggs in a living body to reproduce (the larva eat their way out). At the far end of the spectrum you have rhyzocephalians, which are parasitic barnacles that infest crabs and lobsters and which are basically the Flood from the Halo universe. They can infest a host via a single cell, taking over the central nervous system (making the females perpetually gravid and the males more feminine [for a crab] as well).
Plants are their own bizarre world. The biological species concept is applicable only to sexually reproducing animals; it simply doesn’t work with anything else. And plants flat-out break the concept. They can hybridize, mixing and matching genomes in a way that animals can’t mimic. They also have the whole alternation of generations thing, which is truly weird from a human perspective. Nothing prevents animals from following that pattern–in fact, many parasites do follow something similar (again, see rhyzocephalians).
Then you get into the truly strange, such as walking bryozoan colonies. In these, whole animals serve the purpose that individual organs or tissues serve in other animals–locomotion, reproduction, even some digestion. Cyphonphores do this as well.
There are more things under Heaven, Horatio… I have never seen anything in fantasy so strange that I couldn’t point to a real world organism (sometimes fossils, admittedly) that was even weirder. If someone put a sandbox tree or a zombie-making mushroom in a fantasy story folks would consider them emersion-breaking, but they are things that exist in the real world today. Reproduction is no different.
It’s amazing how often sucky humans vs. glorious beautiful basically human but much better comes up in speculative fiction. The entire humans v. mutant thing in the X-Men is another variety of the conflict. The most charitable read I can give, and this isn’t really great, is that you got a lot of people bullied during their childhood and teen years ending up writing speculative fiction and wanting to portray their in-group as beautiful and special while the sucky humans represent their bullies. It is a form of catharsis for what they grew up with. There are less charitable readings though and they might be correct.
Sounds about right. I know that’d appeal to me.
Oren, have you ever read Magic Slays by Kate Daniels? You might be interested in that one.
I don’t believe so. Kate Daniels is one of the characters, right? I think Ilona Andrews is the author.
Maybe she could have make it that Aeriat shifted into Arbora and viceversa, and current Arbora being unable to shift because that spells. Also the populate cities could be located on flying islands, unknown to the groundlings and just trading between themselves, ignoring everything under the “surface”.
I keep reading Raksura as Rakshasa!
That might actually be more interesting, though…
Man, the “good” section of this world looks right up my alley. I myself have been working on a setting based on dangerous, monster-filled wilderness, where civilisation exists as small isolated communities rather than big, sprawling cities and trade routes. I even have the floating lands, though mine are ancient temples rather than natural landmasses. And dragon people? Shut the front door, I LOVE dragon people (and lizard people, and to a lesser degree snake people, and yes I am a scaley how did you know), and I wish they were used more often as actual characters and heroes rather than nameless, faceless mooks.
But, uh…yeesh, shame about all the other stuff.
Yeah the world starts out seeming very cool! Then it gets… less cool.
“One of the first things humans [or human like fantasy creatures] do when they populate an area is clear out the megafauna, either deliberately or as an unintended side effect. It’s difficult to have a stable system of agriculture if dire tigers keep rampaging through the fields.”
It would make for an interesting, dark subversion to have the dire tigers (or other fantasy predator species) be the protagonists of the story. The conflict being that the humanoids view the dire tigers as dangerous predatory monsters best wiped out or heavily culled in the name of civilization. Whereas the dire tigers are also sapient, they’re just aloof and prefer to keep their distance from the humanoids who are constantly encroaching on their territory. While physically more powerful and intimidating, they’re often outmatched by the humanoids’ magic/weaponry, as you alluded to. That way the writer could center a cool, misunderstood species that is realistically fighting for survival as opposed to yet another “oppressed mages” story.
Fantasy already has plenty of humanoid species, many of which are essentially just humans with a few additional features (as Bunny pointed out) and it’s unnecessarily limiting. I also find one-dimensional “intrinsically evil” species like Fell or orcs to be lazy world-building, in addition to perpetuating a toxic trope.
Editor’s note: I’ve removed a comment here for pushing transphobia. Disagreeing with our critiques is fine, what’s not fine is saying that stories “don’t have to support Trans characters.”
I always perceived the Raksuras like a swarm of bees, se yes, queens, workers etc…
Once again, while I do agree to some extent with many of these, there’s a lot here that either reads as though this novel had only been skimmed by the author of this article or as if it’d been read a long time ago and a lot of things had been forgotten in favour of assumptions.
I do agree on the underpoweredness and under-utilization of groundlings and to some extent with the shapeshifting, though the Fell connection may provide some reasoning beyond just “gotta make characters more human”.
Most of the magic powers seem fairly limited and relatively confined to standard shaman-y things (aside from the light/fire but that’s established early), while they could have been established earlier they generally aren’t too OP.
The future telling has been pretty firmly established as being useful on a very general level to hint at potentially beneficial actions to take or to give leads but not highly specific very early on and has remained so.
As for the Fell powers, it does seem plausible in a fantasy/medieval “we don’t have a lot of science yet but this explanation makes sense” kind of way, the same way gods are generally used to explain natural events.
It’s not a very hard magic system, but it’s one that is generally consistent, not too OP and that fits well in the very open, unexplored and fantastical world building.
I do somewhat agree on the Fell, though all things considered they area relatively benign example and I’ve heard that later books especially give them more nuance.
In the first book the main thing to note is that Raksura are related to them and that the more closely related Aeriat does share some of their inability to create (though how much of that is cultural is up for debate).
As for Arbora/Aeriat…oof, here is where the “I skimmed/read this ages ago” hits HARD.
Yes, the Queen (and sister queen and consorts) rule which brings the same potential issues as any monarchy or other single/few leader system even representative democracy (there, said it), but generally the Arbora are more valued than the Aeriat aside form Queen and consort as creators and providors.
The idea of workers/farmers being less important socially than warriors imposed on the books here is not only pretty western but also weirdly limited even in that scope given that Arbora includes a lot of teachers, artists, artisans and childcare professionals and while caring jobs may be devalued in today’s society because sexism artists and artisans always had some status.
As for the mind control and forced shifting, this is expressly shown to be very creepy to Moon, who is the only one who didn’t grow up with it being normalized and a huge reason why he is so on edge and uncertain about staying.
The next point…as long as the birthing parents is generally called a woman the sexism will always be baked into society, let’s simply abolish gender (not joking…mostly not joking).
I personally think that differently gendered species (which this clearly is even if not extremely obviously so) can make for fun transploration. Biological sex existing is not a crime (unless it’s my own /s …okay, bad trans joke).
Also, it’s been made pretty clear that in this society (or modern Raksura society in general?) the fighting thing is mostly ritualistic, a way to air grievances and that the consort is usually the one who makes the choice in the end should the queen accept him (again with the skimming problem).
The problem with the unclear level of societal connection is definitely there, I think it’s implied in a very low-key way that the places Moon lived were more familiar with Fell than Raksura and that it may be regional with the world being huge and news travelling slowly due to not every place being connected to everything, but that could certainly have been more clear and better thought out.
Terminology I don’t agree with entirely but I understand. I always assumed it to be kind of an ingroup vs outgroup kind of deal that’s not necessarily entirely literal. There are other shapeshifters in setting though.
That’s not to say that it’s perfect, there are definitely many flaws in this society though I personally think that more than a few are deliberate and it’s less an exploration of any “shoulds” and more of an imperfect society paired with what are essentially giant lizard-lions with some potentially questionable powers.
Which may not be your thing, but I personally do dig the moral ambiguity of potentially morally abuseable powers, imperfect societies and both, so long as the author doesn’t try to paint them as perfect through authorial endorsement (which, let’s be clear, is not present here. There’s numerous more-or-less subtle criticisms strewn throughout) .
Hey Seio, a quick editor’s note: we have a specific rule in our comments policy against accusing others of not reading or watching the story in question. I’m not deleting this comment because you clearly put a lot of work into it, but please remember for the future that you can disagree with us without getting into personal insult territory. It’s much more likely that we simply interpreted the text differently than that one of us didn’t properly read it.
My apologies, some of these seemed fairly clear to me but that may be from a possibly very different opinion of the amount of moral signalling an author should (have to?) engage in, with my personal preference heavily leaning towards relying on in-universe reactions and consequences while a more direct approach seems predominantly preferred here.
Oh my gosh this essay is like a breath of fresh air. I loved reading The Books of the Raksura series, but it has soo many blatant problems I’ve never seen anyone except my literal twin discuss, finding this article was the highlight of my day.
I think this article is just a review for The Cloud Roads, rather than the whole series, but another thing I want to add on that I noticed continuing in The Murderbot Diaries is that Martha Wells does not plan ahead very well at all, with the tail ends of her series contradicting the first installment, and once you read the whole rest of the series and then reread The Cloud Roads, it becomes nonsensical and absurd.
(This is less of an issue with The Murderbot Diaries because they’re so short, but it’s still noticeable. We’re shown later that people on Preservation casually treat robots like people,,,but then why did they all just treat Murderbot like less than any other robot?
Even if they’re thinking of it as “just a robot” and “not a person with a human-like face”….the society they come from means they should have been treating it like a person anyways. They shouldnt’ need to see its human-cloned tissue face to think of it like a person. This is a pretty drastic contradiction to what we’re shown later, but it never gets brought up again and most people don’t even notice it, even though it’s a pretty ridiculously big plot hole once you think about it, considering how short the stories are!)
One thing I’ve never seen anyone else discuss is the transmisia–
(a different term for transphobia that’s not antagonistic towards people with genuine anxiety-induced phobias like agoraphobia, ecetera. The suffix “-misia” comes from the Latin word for hatred, which is also the prefix in “misogyny”)
–in the way Chime and River were treated by that narrative, as well as the inherently classism in the way River specifically was punished for “getting above his station”.
Chime and River are both very heavily trans-coded, not identifying with the genders and gender roles their society forces upon them, and both of them receive nothing but mistreatment and abuse for this fact.
We’re not supposed to think River’s a bad person because he went around abusing Arbora, supposedly the ones the Aeriat are meant to protect, we’re supposed to think he’s a bad person who deserves to be shunted to the bottom of the social ladder because he………..wants to be a consort? Meaning he’s basically transgender???? And this is why he’s punished and hated afterward by the whole colony, but not a single person had any problem with his behavior when he was going around beating the crap out of Arbora????
And then Chime, who’s literally magically forced to change sexes, who does not identify with the new sex and gender roles he’s been forced into, is treated like a whiny annoyance whenever he expresses discomfort with what’s happened or wants to find out if he can change back. Everyone, including Moon, just tells him he needs to stop complaining and get over it because his complaining is annoying everyone else.
I remember in one of the last two books of the series–and this ties in with the biological essentialism and gender essentialism rampant in this series—he’s not even allowed to do something as simple as help pitch a tent without literally being chased away by a snarling, “Real” Arbora.
Which A is just transmisia, he’s being excluded from activities he did before just because his physical sex no longer matches his gender identity, and also just drives home the problem between the Arbora and the Warriors that we’re just supposed to think is pefectly fine.
Warriors are constantly insulted and called useless and stupid because they don’t do anything to help out around the colony, but then literally they are not allowed to help. (And again, this is Martha Wells not planning things out properly. Why do the warriors even exist if they don’t actually protect the colony? 90% of the time it’s Moon, Stone, and Jade fighting, with the warriors not really actually helping in fights at all. Except of course for when, later in the series, Balm somehow manages to take down a Ruler all on her own with no problem despite the fact that we keep being told Fell are terrifying and deadly)
Anyways I’m getting off track.
The Arbora refuse to teach the warriors how to dress kills properly, then get mad when they don’t do it right. They call them lazy, then literally chase them away with LITERAL snarling when they try to help out. And Chime isn’t even a warrior, he’s a damn mentor, he didn’t ask to be magically changed into a warrior for no logical biological or storytelling reason!
Chime isn’t even trusted to visit other colonies libraries because of the stigma against “warriors”, and no one ever even aknowledges that he’s not a warrior. It’s biological essentialism and Martha Wells equating sex with gender and gender rolls, and we’re just supposed to be fine with it.
This is also a problem in The Murderbot Diaries that I hardly ever see anyone address – Martha Wells is still equating sex with gender, which is why literally every single robot character uses it/its pronouns and is genderless. Because she thinks that since they don’t have a sex, they can’t have a gender either.
All robots are assigned genderless upon construction, and this is just. How it is, apparently. Murderbot gets praised as being awesome trans representation, but it’s not even trans (unless Martha Wells retconns and changes its backstory), it’s literally a cis robot, whose gender is determined by its lack of sex, along with its sexuality of being aroace.
And I say this as someone who is aroace, and nonbinary, and uses it/its pronouns!
This would be fine if there were other robot characters who used pronouns other than it/its, who had orientations and genders that weren’t just “no”, and humans who were explcitly trans and nonbinary who get more than a few pages of “screentime” before being shoved out of the story forever, never to be mentioned again (Like Rami, the one human character who was explicitly nonbinary and used neopronouns, was!). It’s just a bunch of stereotypes and nothing else to makes it anything more!
This has lead to people who read these books to legitimately think that only fictional characters use it/its pronouns, so it’s okay for them to misgender Murderbot and me, the real person who uses it/its pronouns who’s trying to correct them.
Martha Wells definitely has a problem with bioessentialism, and with the rest of The Books of the Raksura, it becomes even more painfully obvious and racist. The fact that the Fell are portrayed as iredeemably evil….until the magical mixed-race kids, who have Good And Moral Raksuran Blood, teach them to not be evil….
Like, one of the well-respected and wise characters literally offers straight up eugenics as a solution to the problem of the Fell being so Inherently Evil, and we’re supposed to think it’s an awesome idea and nod along in excitement rather than be horrified. This same scene also confirms that the Raksura are practicing eugenics, strictly controlling who is allowed to have kids with who.
There is so much stuff I have to criticize about this series, this isn’t even the tip of the iceberg! And I loved reading them! Apparently being able to enjoy something for what it does right, and criticize it for what it does wrong, is an almost impossible feat, according to 90% of Martha Wells fans.
But anyways, thank you so much for writing this essay, this is everything I’ve been looking for and not finding since I read these books. Unfortunately the fandom on tumblr and the few other sites I’ve checked is absolutely terrible, people are just reducing the polayamory to a jealous love triangle, and whitewash the characters :| And The Murderbot Diaries fandom is even worse, oh my gods.
Please keep up the good work, and if you have read the rest of The Books of the Raksura, (It seems like this review is just for the first book, but I’m not sure) I look forward to any other essays you write about it! This is my first time visiting this site but I’m definitely going to check out the other stuff you’ve written!
Okay, wow, this is completely unrelated, but I think I’ve seen you on Tumblr before. Do you have a blog with the same name you’re using to comment here?
Yep, I post about The Books of the Raksura and The Murderbot Diaries and whatever else I happen to be reading/watching at the same time, lol.
Thought so; funny thing, I actually have you blocked (don’t think it’s from anything you posted, I’m just covered by your DNI).
Glad you enjoyed the article! I wouldn’t have thought of Chime and River as a gender parallel, but that’s why it pays to get a wide variety of perspectives.